


A Family Name

by RedHorse



Series: Tomarry/Harrymort prompt fills [6]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, F/F, Female Harry Potter, Female Tom Riddle, Mind Manipulation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-22
Updated: 2019-04-22
Packaged: 2020-01-15 01:39:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18488668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RedHorse/pseuds/RedHorse
Summary: Harry's pretty sure her obsession with her GTA, the beautiful and mysterious girl named Tom, is healthy and normal. She's always had an overactive imagination, that's all.





	A Family Name

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Yoshishisha](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yoshishisha/gifts).



> Happy exchange to yoshishisha! I took some interpretive liberties with your prompt, but I hope you like it anyway. <3
> 
> Thanks to Wolf_of_Lilacs, my lovely beta reader. <3

“Stop staring,” hissed Dan from Harry’s left. 

“Stop whispering,” she muttered back. “It’s not as subtle as you think.”

“Neither,” Dan whispered, the stubborn fucker, “is the staring.”

It was hard _not_ to stare. Tom was beautiful, from her long glossy hair to her elegant feet, sadly concealed today by closed-toed wedges. Tom was passing something out from the center aisle of the lecture hall, and soon she’d reach Harry and Dan’s row. Harry deliberately stopped staring as Tom got closer. Once she’d forgotten and accidentally made eye contact, which had thrown her off-kilter for the next forty-eight hours. There was something too mesmerizing about Tom’s eyes, the irises so dark they seemed black.

Harry knew Tom had reached them when the stack of flyers came into her field of vision, held in Tom’s right hand. There was a thin gold chain bracelet around her wrist. She had a clean fragrance that Harry had never been close enough to smell, but somehow it seemed familiar.

It was the smell, maybe, of fresh grass. Or very cold water on stone. 

Harry took the flyers, careful not to touch Tom’s fingers even as she memorized the shape of her unmanicured nails.

“You should join in,” said Tom, and it took a very long moment for Harry to realize she was being spoken to and look up.

Their eyes met, and the effect upon Harry was dizzying. The only thing that brought her back to earth was Dan’s elbow grinding painfully into her ribs.

“Ow!” she snapped at him, scowling, then looked back at Tom in horror. “I mean, er.”

“She means that she’s already looking forward to it,” Dan said smoothly. “Thanks, Tom.”

Tom arched a brow and moved on.

* * *

Tom was a GTA, which meant that she was either older than Harry, or that she was one of those brilliant students who finished school by twelve or something, then went to university before puberty. Harry could envision either scenario. Tom certainly _seemed_ older—she had a level of sophisticated self-possession better-suited to the faculty than the student-body, though she was businesslike rather than friendly with the professors.

And Tom _was_ brilliant. It was obvious when the professor, occasionally stumbling in a lecture, would blush and shoot Tom a look like he was afraid of being criticized.

Beneath the messy scrawl of a grade percentage with a red circle around it from the professor, every paper also contained neat notes for improvement, obviously from Tom. They were so insightful, Harry sometimes wondered if Tom, from behind her little desk in the corner, was passing the time by casually reading all the students’ minds.

Not that such things were possible, but Harry had always had an overactive imagination. For example, she once thought, watching Tom bend down to pick up a scrap of crumpled paper from the floor, that just as Tom’s hand would have otherwise closed around the rubbish, it simply disappeared instead.

* * *

The flyer was for volunteers for an experiment that lasted a weekend, paid $20.00 and gave 100 points of extra credit, and required they answer pages of tedious personal questions for an interviewer. Cell phones weren’t allowed and the total duration was forty-eight hours. It sounded horrible, except that Tom was one of the interviewers.

So, of course, Harry was going to go.

* * *

Harry’s name was written on a list outside a classroom at the primary school they were using for the experiment. It was funny to come into the room and see the brightly-colored animal posters on the walls and the finger-paintings tacked on a corkboard, and there in the midst of it Tom, sleek and dignified in all black, sitting with her legs crossed at the ankle in a chair behind the teacher’s desk.

“Good morning, Harry,” she said, without having to glance at her list to confirm Harry’s name. Harry’s cheeks felt warm, and she sat where she assumed she must be meant to: across from Tom, in the only other adult-sized chair in the room.

“It’s going to be a long day, so we had better begin. What’s your middle name?”

“Lily,” said Harry.

Tom glanced up from her notes. “‘Harry Lily’?”

“Well, it’s _Harriet_ ,” said Harry, rubbing the palms of her hands against her denim-clad knees.

“I see. Is it a family name?”

“Yeah. My aunt.” Harry had been expecting a more random set of questions, like _what was your favorite kind of dinosaur as a child, and what do you think that says about your personality?_ But she supposed those were too _obviously_ psychological.

“When were you born?”

“Oh, they’re not sure. I was adopted. We say August 1, officially, but when I was little, my mum and dad would let me celebrate for three days in a row.” Harry remembered that when she’d told that same thing to Dan, he’d rolled his eyes like he always did when she let slip how her parents spoiled her.

“That’s very curious. And what year?”

“1981.”

Harry listened to the soft sound of the felt-tipped pen on the notebook. How was the room so perfectly quiet? She remembered rooms like this from her own youth; she’d seen the building on her way in. It was the kind of old building where the pipes clanged and the heat came on and off with a rattle and whine like someone was being murdered in the cellar.

For some reason, the thought of murder always made Harry think of the color green.

Tom left her alone, and Harry sat imagining how Tom would answer the same questions. Harry wondered what Tom’s middle name was, and when she was born. She looked like someone born in winter, but maybe that was only because with her pale complexion and midnight hair, her dark pink lips, Harry thought of the Snow White story.

* * *

By the third interview, Harry was so hungry she finally couldn’t stop herself from complaining.

“You’ll eat later,” Tom said, with a sharp look. “This was all on the consent form. A limited diet is part of the experiment.”

“Later” turned out to mean late in the afternoon. So late, Harry could see the beginning of the sunset through the smudged schoolroom window, cut into jagged shapes by the clutter of students’ drawings taped to the glass. It was a slab of bread and butter, and Harry was so hungry she didn’t even notice the strange taste.

“One more set of questions for today,” said Tom when she came back in and went back to her chair.

Harry nodded, half-listless, even her fascination with Tom unable to rouse her from the drowsiness that had overcome her now that she was no longer hungry.

“What is your middle name?”

* * *

Tom showed Harry to a room with a cot in it where Harry slept alone. She knew there were other people in the experiment. There had been an awful lot of flyers, after all. Apparently isolation was part of the experiment. She really should have read that consent form; but she was so accustomed to signing school papers without thinking anything of it. She had never liked isolation. Sleeping on the floor made her think of her childhood.

But that didn’t make any sense. She had always slept in a bed as soft as pillows; her aunt made sure of it.

* * *

It began again the next morning. Tom brought the slice of bread and butter with her and Harry spoke between bites. Tom waited patiently while she chewed and swallowed. Today Tom was wearing a black, long-sleeved shirt with a scoop neck that showed off her collarbones and a neck like a swan’s. Harry had always thought herself small and bony, and Tom made her feel smaller and less important than ever.

“Why are there so many of the same questions?”

“I can’t explain the experiment, or it would compromise the results,” Tom said. “Would you like some water?”

Harry nodded, expecting Tom to get up and retrieve a water bottle from another room, or maybe from the large leather bag she had carried in with her. Instead she reached beneath the desk and emerged with a glass.

“Where did that come from?”

Tom winked. “Magic.” 

The wink was so unsettling that Harry could think of nothing to do but take the glass and drink from it. The water was cool and perfect.

“Is ‘Lily’ a family name?” Tom asked, for the sixth time.

Harry looked past Tom at a little chalk sketch in the corner of the blackboard which Harry hadn’t noticed the day before. Strange, since she was sure she had memorized every square inch of the room, particularly between interviews when she was left alone.

The sketch showed two figures, and the whole scene was smudged, as though by someone brushing up against the blackboard as they walked past. The accident had given the chalk figures a ghostly appearance, but Harry could tell they were meant to be two deer. The doe standing slightly ahead of the buck, her head lowered protectively. The buck looking askance.

“It was my mother’s name,” Harry said, and then she frowned. “My aunt’s.”

“Right,” said Tom. Her pen made its small noise as she wrote.

* * *

By the late afternoon Harry wasn’t feeling well. She found a place in the corner where she could lie down, pillowing her head on the fluffy stomach of a large stuffed dog. She woke up to find Tom waiting for her at the desk, and got slowly to her feet, walked over and sat in her chair.

“We’re almost done, now, Harry. Here, have some water.”

Harry no longer wondered where the cold water came from, she only drank gratefully. When she set the glass down, Tom asked a new question.

“Harry, do you fancy me?”

“Well, yes,” Harry said, too tired for coyness. “Or I did, before you tricked me into a weekend of torment.”

Tom laughed. Harry had never heard her laugh before. It was very soft and low. “Oh, my sweet girl. _This_ is not torment.” 

Harry snorted, and drank again. She happened to glance over the rim of the glass and noticed Tom watching her. Her eyes were bright, not black at all, but a deep auburn color like burnt honey. Harry wasn’t sure how she hadn’t noticed before, but then again, she _did_ try not to look Tom in the eye.

“Maybe it wouldn’t hurt,” Tom murmured as though to herself, “just this once.” 

She left her chair and came over to Harry, took the glass from Harry’s hands and set it aside. She carded her long fingers through Harry’s short hair, then grasped Harry’s head firmly and tilted it back. Harry’s lips parted at the sight of Tom so close, standing between Harry’s knees, her nails rasping against Harry’s scalp.

“You’re happy here, aren’t you, Harry?” Tom slowly got to her knees, her hands trailing from Harry’s head to her shoulders, then down her sides. Her thumb grazed Harry’s nipple and she gasped.

Harry wasn’t sure what Tom meant, and also she knew exactly. It was an odd feeling, to hold ignorance and knowledge simultaneously in her head, and it left her speechless.

So did the cool air on her stomach as Tom lifted her shirt.

* * *

“So, how did it go?” Dan asked, settling beside Harry Monday morning in their first class.

“Hm?” she glanced up from the textbook open in her lap, and seeing it, he wrinkled his nose.

“Are you cramming _again_?”

Harry’s face heated. “For all you know, I’m just revising for the second time.”

Dan rolled his eyes. “It’s actually funny, how bad you are at lying. Anyway, how was it? Your grueling weekend drooling all over Tom’s shoes?”

Harry frowned, her heart plummeting. “Oh, fuck.”

Dan raised an eyebrow. “That bad?”

“No,” Harry moaned, disbelief and embarrassment making her heart pound. “I forgot to go.” She bit her lip and looked at Dan hopefully. “Do you think she’ll ever forgive me?”

Dan smiled at Harry gently and patted her arm. “Oh, honey. I think she has no idea who you are.”

Harry sighed. Dan was probably right, and it was really for the best. If she’d remembered and gone, she probably would have just embarrassed herself, anyway.

She propped her chin on her hand and looked down at the front of the classroom where Tom sat to one side, a neat stack of paper in front of her. Harry stiffened, though, at the unprecedented sight of Tom looking straight back at Harry. Noticing her. She reached out without looking away and grabbed Dan’s arm so he could tell her whether she was just imagining it. Harry was always imagining things.


End file.
